Robert Zokoe is a “Lifetime Member” of the Golf Heritage Society. He admits he might be a little crazy, having spent 30 years creating the American Golf Musuem in Brooksville, Fl (an hour north of Tampa) which he believes is the largest collection of golf memorabilia on the planet, a claim he hopes that Guinness Book of World Records might verify someday. While many members of the GHS have a collecting passion with a specific focus, Bob has created a wonderland of golf artifacts that revisit and preserve a century of golf in America.
A Golf Magazine article describes him as – Spry at 75, with a sun-ruddied face and a shock of white hair, Zokoe (rhymes with loco) rolls open a metal security gate (of his warehouse several airplane hangers in size) and steps through a doorway. Inside, the air is cool and dry and still, climate-controlled to preserve the building’s contents: a dizzying assortment of golf-themed miscellanea, spanning a century of the game. Arranged in aisles of glassed-in cabinets, the items have been grouped into more than 250 categories, named, numbered and digitally archived.
They include belts, birdhouses and bobblehead dolls, coffee mugs and candleholders, light fixtures and lawn ornaments, training aids, towels, tees, cocktails trays and on — more than 40,000 objects, not counting the golf clubs, balls and tees which Zokoe has amassed in quantities so great that he’s lost count, dating from 1910 to 2009. The timeframe is intentional. It represents, in Zokoe’s view, a century of American dominance in the game, starting with the rise of Walter Hagen and ending with the twilight of Tiger Woods.
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